I decided to visit Jackson, who moved to Tom’s River for work this weekend. Tom’s River is known as the beginning of the Jersey Shore. I recruited Jon & Phil to come with me so off we went on the New Jersey Transit system. For a huge Manhattanite like me, it’s always hard to get up at the asscrack of dawn to visit the middle of nowhere- especially when I find out that nowhere has an entrance fee for its beach… and that the beach isn’t even that pretty. We took the 10:30 out of Port Authority and got there a little before 12:30 with traffic.
Driving around, all we saw were chain restaurants- Checkers, Ihop, Chilli’s- and if you read Chew on This or Fast Food Nation, you’d know what that was all about. All the fast food owners love to plant their restaurants on major interstates so that’s all people see when they’re driving by on the major roads. We ended up at Friendly’s because the guys have never been and I haven’t been since my days of living in suburbia.
looks like any other friendly’s, eh?
There was a summer special going on- if you get something off that menu, they’d give you a free sundae! We were all over that offer. There were 4 dishes and 4 of us- we each ordered something different. I got fish and chips that came with a side of cole slaw. Their fish was pretty good, but their fries sucked. I am a fan of the super crunchy shoe string fries and these were.. quite the opposite. It was oil drenched soggy and lumpy stuff that shouldn’t be allowed in the fries category. The slaw was okay- nothing special like the ones from the big apple bbq and not pictured below.
fish & fake chips
For the sundae, Friendly’s was very friendly about the idea of “free.” I thought they were going to offer 1 scoop of ice cream, 1 topping, whipped cream and a cherry. Instead, we got two scoops of ice cream and a topping- they also have a very wide selection. I chose the black raspberry and vanilla with marshmallow fluff [mm… fluff] on top. The black raspberry was very purple, which kinda put me off but it was yummy so I don’t care.
*slurp
For dinner, I decided I didn’t want to go to another chain restaurant. Jax said there is a chinese buffet near him so I figured, why not? I knew it couldn’t be that good because it’s chinese food in the suburbs but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Jax just moved to Tom’s River a month ago, and he is always busy at work so he hasn’t been able to explore all the cool insider places to eat yet. We did pass by a Stewart’s Root Beer stand/kiosk type place that I thought was really cool. Anyways, we had dinner at Amy Buffet 2 for $11.95 per person.
what happened to one?
The hot and sour soup was okay. The rice for the sushi was too hard; it wasn’t fresh. The squid wasn’t chewy enough- it was also breaded oddly… not enough breading to matter but too much to ignore. The breading for the sweet and sour chicken was also bad. The clams were good. The cake was okay. I heard the ice cream and hibachi were good too. Here is everything I ate that night.
After dinner, we got dropped off at the bus station and decided to open up the pack of Airheads I bought earlier at Target. They had advertisements from the movie Cars. I grabbed the flavor named “burnt rubber.” It turned out to be grape. How clever.
vroom vroom
Daniel called us out for desert when we got back to the city, so we hit upFerrara’s in Little Italy.
leather bound menus
Daniel got a slice of tiramisu and I got a hazelnut cappuccino while the others got other drinks [Italian cherry soda and lemonade]. The lemonade was a hit; it was made with real lemons and was a bit of a slushy. The tiramisu is always good here and cappuccinos are ordinary.
cappacino & tiramisu are perfect compliments.
It’s been a long day after all this traveling and fooding, so I cabbed it home and watched Ocean’s 11 [Target $7.50] before crashing.